I know that plenty of people are aware that having a high watt rating on your power supply is a good thing.. Although.. Running a big power supply is not always going to guarantee that it will supply enough power.. Amperes rating is an important thing to look at also.. Now, most of the time, you buy a 500w or some such power supply, and because its 500w, its produced by a reputable company, and normally will output a good amount of amps.
I look at my 300w PSU.. On the 12v circuit, it supplies 18 amps. On par with the amps rating of many 400w PSU's. The Radeon does require power.. The draw of power, is rated in amps.. For example.. Check out a car stereo amplifier.. It says it outputs 1000 watts!!.. Well.. How many amps does in require for a fuse.. 20 amps?? There is no way that 1000w is going to be generated with an input of 20 amps. Be careful when buying your "big" power supply.. Look at the amps ratings, they ARE important.. Im not sure that many people realize this or not.. But ask, before you shell out cash for that high watt power supply..

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Quote:

Originally Posted by Redeemed

Granted, this is coming from the fella' who's had over 1,000lbs of bucking muscle under neath him.

I saw a 550W PSU a couple of weekends ago on sale at a computer fair (25% of people were selling the same model) and I practically had to beg to get someone to open a box and let me see the rating label. Turned out it only had 13A, pretty poor for such a powerful PSU.

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Quote:

Originally Posted by phial

pfft ive had ego clashes with admins before. at times, its better to accept a ban than to take it up the ass.

this stereo 1000w....and 20amps example is stupid because a 20a amplifier takes that current from the mains, at 110v or 240v..which results to 20 X 240v = 4800W. so it can give 4v at 1000amps....i mean this is not all true in real life but maths works this way.

so this could be misleading cos 1000w at the output, at 100% efficiency can be true.

so 12v line at 18 amps = 218W
and 5v line at 30 amps = 150W

and if we sum this we get 368W

at 240v we draw only 1.53amps from mains.

so image if it draws 20amps at 240v how much we get at the output at 100% efficiency.

Originally posted by sebvanaaken does anybody know if the radeon draws most of its power from the 12v or 5v line???

I would guess the 12V rail since it connects to a 12V connector.

I haven't had any PSU related problems with my system. Used to have an Enermax 350W, now I'm running an Antec TruePower 430W. With the Enermax, the 5V rail would drop to ~4.80V when the computer was working hard. With the TP430W it's at a stable 5.00V no matter what.

__________________"Son, no one gives a **** about all the things your cell phone does. You didn't invent it, you just bought it. Anybody can do that."

hmm- but there is a 5v connector in the plug aswell... My enermax did suffer when i put the 9700pro in but enermaxes are meant to be weak on the 5v line and strong on the 12v whereas antecs are meant to be the other way around...

1) air cooled 178fsb stable and happy with what i thought was plenty of power from my 431w enermax

2) vapochill -30c on cpu same settings as air cooled as i just wanted to monitor how this new vapochill worked, mmmm no boot at 178fsb, i tried everything i could think of but it would only boot at 173fsb and then not totaly stable so had to settle for 171fsb

now what changed? nothing apart from vapochill, na cant be my enermax has plenty of power and the vapo dosnt draw alot mmmm 3 days later ok iam gona do what i said i didnt need to and upgrade my psu to the 550w blue diamond enermax psu

1) air cooled 184fsb stable mmmm OMG can this be true was my 431w holding me back even when i wasnt running vapo, well yea it was, i bought my 431w to run athlon 1G CPUs and it took them to the limit, but now big fans, radeon 9700pro and 2 H/Ds and many more add ons after my initial purchase. my trusty 431w that when i bought it i considerd upgrade proof and never question power again proof just wasnt upto my pc demands, yea it was at stock speeds and it did allow clocking with sucess air cooled but it did run out of steam when it counted, so in the end even a good psu can run short of power when demand runs high

2) 184fsb and stable with a higher multipler! ive had 2.45G out of my XP2400 and yea its stable! so for the moment iam meeting my power requirements but in the future and that day will come i wont be so bold as to disregard my psu! when stabilty becomes an issue!